City planners should take on a "maieutic" role, which is to say that they should encourage wide participation in a process that elicits and enlists the latent knowledge and desires of all citizens in a city-building effort. Planners must try to obtain a sense of (1) what the everyday life of people living in and using cities is like, and (2) the levels and qualities of the institutionalized portions of the lives of city dwellers. Planners should be politically minded professionals who have an alternative vision of city planning. Instead of speaking of city-rebuilding, renewal, or redevelopment, planners should speak of city-building, city-creation, and city-construction. At the center of this alternative vision are cooperative human projects that can function as effectively as, and more humanely than, traditional institutional organizations. An example can be found in the situation of contemporary British workers. The company or office has become a social center as well as an office of production. The personnel office, secretaries, mailrooms, and office canteens have informally taken over the social roles of the clergy, the extended family, and the great houses that used to form the basis of the old English village. However, even these new, informal institutions at the office do not allow workers to participate as total people because they are too structured. When city planners begin to act maieutically, they will concern themselves with opening up all institutions to participation: the company, the school, the local government, and the local economy. (Author/BC)

Note: Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (New York, New York, August 31-September 3, 1978); Not available in hard copy from EDRS due to poor reproducibility of original document